If you look back at water films that have been done in the past - and what springs to mind is The Abyss - it just seems like the sense of being underwater was always done with bubbles. He wanted this film to sound unique and be tailor-made. The second request was, “No bubbles.” James initially didn’t want any bubble sounds in the film. PB: The dialogue was the first request and I think we nailed that in temp one. Did you do any field recordings of water, in water, or with water? Can you tell me about your water sound collection for Aquaman? Water is a major component of this soundtrack. PB: Like that line from Vulko (Willem Dafoe) in Reel 2 when he yells, “We’d honor you, King Nereus!” James wanted to hit the echo and reverb on that because it was a shouted line.Īlso, as the characters moved closer or further from camera Tim LeBlanc would continually tweak the dialog processing making it sound dynamic and alive. Sometimes the character had a rise in their performance, then James would want to hit that with more water echo for dramatic emphasis. JD: It was completely done to taste for James. We would hit it hard the first times people would be talking underwater and then dial it back.
The processing wouldn’t be the same for every line. It was bouncing around and too echo-y.īy the end, we had pared it back to a little bit of flange and a bit of phase, if we needed more there was an additional reverb, ping-pong delay, and echo to put on there. But the dialogue lines that sounded really interesting were just too interesting for the dialogue to work in the film. We’d take the same dialogue lines and do different vocal processing on them and send them over for review. PB: We started off with phasers, flangers, ping-pong delays, and deep echo. What did your processing chain look like for the underwater vocals? You come up with something that works for the scene and then you pare it back a bit - not to the point where the audience can perceptively hear that you backed it down but just so there is enough clarity on the lines. We had to find an approach that worked for the film that we could establish and minimize here and there. At that point, we knew that we couldn’t take a literal approach. We listened to some tracks with actual underwater IRs and it made the dialogue sound completely submerged and unintelligible. Joe Dzuban (JD): Or too realistic! One of our sound designers Eliot Connors has some underwater IRs (impulse responses). So you can’t do anything that is too crazy… Often there is a lot of plot information transferred in those words.
Things are fast-paced in an action film and you have one shot of hearing what’s going on. Whenever you do a vocal treatment, the first rule is that the dialogue needs to be intelligible. So that was the first types of design we started to roll through and send over to the picture department.
They had the concept and knew they were going to do it but they didn’t know what it was going to sound like and what it would take to sell that idea. Peter Brown (PB): The first thing out of everybody’s mouth was how do we get these guys to talk underwater? That was the million-dollar question. What were director James Wan’s initial goals for sound? How did he want to use sound to help tell this story? Read on to find out how Brown and Dzuban, along with sound designers Eliot Connors and Stephen Robinson, created everything from Trident hits and ‘laser’ guns to underwater vocals for Aquaman. Through effects processing and smart mix decisions, the team was able to keep the water sounds contained and craft a soundtrack that has both dynamics and clarity. That inherently white-noisy sound eats up sonic space and can easily make a mix muddy. Stage 10.Īnother challenge they faced was working with water. Dzuban was also the effects re-recording mixer, working alongside re-recording mixer Tim LeBlanc on dialogue/music on Warner Bros. Tidal waves, underwater battles, an evil race of ocean-dwelling creatures known as the Trench, and a spinning vortex of sonic turmoil are just a few of the massive sound elements that Formosa Group supervising sound editors Peter Brown and Joe Dzuban tackled for Aquaman.
He knows how to build suspense and how to make room for big sound moments - two important skills he put to use on Warner Bros. DESIGNING AQUAMAN’S DRAMATIC DEEP-SEA SOUND:ĭirector James Wan is best known for his horror films - like Saw, The Conjuring films, and the Insidious films.